Chris Powell: Their TV ads are phony; politicians don’t support vets

Published 8:45 pm, Friday, November 11, 2016

World War II veteran Irvin Daubert and U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty in this April file photo, after she presented the Cheshire resident with medals he had earned for his service, but never received.

World War II veteran Irvin Daubert and U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty in this April file photo, after she presented the Cheshire resident with medals he had earned for his service, but never received.

Photo: New Haven Register File Photo

Chris Powell: Their TV ads are phony; politicians don’t support vets

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Campaigning for re-election in Connecticut, members of Congress and the General Assembly insisted that they would do almost anything for military veterans.

But no candidate pledged to do what veterans most deserve — to get them out and keep them out of the stupid and futile imperial wars the United States has been waging since invading Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and waging war against Syria and ISIS since 2014. (A few days ago two U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan and three U.S. soldiers assisting the war against Syria and ISIS were killed in confusing circumstances in Jordan.)

Blumenthal broadcast a television commercial boasting of the assistance he had arranged for soldiers who have suffered from mental illness upon their return from the Middle East. Esty broadcast a TV commercial featuring the father of an Army soldier who was killed in Iraq. The father praised Esty for legislating more support for Gold Star families.

But the commercials did not address why U.S. forces should still be fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq so long after the invasions — did not address the failure of the invasions to install stable and democratic governments and bring peace to those countries.

That’s because “nation building” by the United States isn’t going to change the barbaric culture of that part of the world. It will only kill a lot of people for nothing and create a lot of refugees as our soldiers fight wars that their country doesn’t mean to win.

Supporting veterans isn’t a matter of benefits. It’s a matter of putting the whole country behind its soldiers when they are in combat and not sending them into combat otherwise. Nobody in elective office in Connecticut supports veterans that much.

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HE LOST MORE THAN THE ELECTION: For last-minute campaign dirty tricks it would be hard to top the one pulled this week by former state Rep. Joe Dominico, D-Manchester, in his rematch with the Manchester Republican who ousted him two years ago, Mark Tweedie.

Hitting mailboxes in their district on the day before the election, and thereby allowing no timely rebuttal, was a card from the Dominico campaign scorning Tweedie for voting against “An Act Protecting Victims of Domestic Violence.” The card said simply: “Tweedie’s actions are unforgivable.”

But legislation is often mistitled for propaganda purposes. The bill in question, enacted this year, might better have been titled “An Act to Punish Certain People Before Any Finding of Fault” or the “’Alice in Wonderland’ Act,” memorializing the proclamation of Lewis Carroll’s crazy Queen: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

That is, the bill required the expropriation by the state, without a hearing, of any firearms owned by anyone merely accused of posing a threat of domestic violence. Opposing the bill, certain Republican legislators stood up courageously for ordinary due process of law.

Dominico’s dirty trick failed and he lost both the election and his honor.

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GRACIOUS AND THOUGHTFUL TOO LATE: As awful a candidate as Hillary Clinton was, she still is winning the national popular vote by more than 300,000 over Donald Trump.

While the Electoral College remains the preferable mechanism for choosing the president, since it creates state-by-state firewalls against voter fraud, the popular vote still confers a moral victory on Clinton, and her concession speech was so gracious and thoughtful and delivered with such restraint that it invited wonder if she could have won the Electoral College as well if she had campaigned that way instead of shouting and posturing at people.